PLEASANTON, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/26/12 -- YarcData Inc., a Cray company (NASDAQ: CRAY) that is focused on providing "Big Data" graph analytics solutions to enterprise customers, today announced the official start of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, which features $100,000 in prizes. Announced earlier this month, the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge will recognize the best submissions for un-partitionable, Big Data graph problems as determined by the panel of judges.

The contest is now officially open, and contestants can review contest rules and submission criteria at http://yarcdata.com/graph-analytic-challenge.html and submit entries. The grand prize for the first place winner is $70,000. The second place winner will receive $13,000 and the third place winner will receive $8,000. There will also be prizes for the other finalists.

YarcData is holding the contest to showcase the increasing applicability and adoption of graph analytics in solving Big Data problems, and also to promote the use and development of RDF and SPARQL as the industry standard for graph analytics. "This is an exciting chance to tap the creativity of the community to get past the misconception that graph computing is only about charting social tribes. In actuality there are a host of complex problems across private and public sectors, driven by many-to-many relationships that have defied solution through conventional means. Competitions are a great way of showing that the solutions are real," said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum Research.

A panel of Big Data industry analysts, experts on semantic technology, and YarcData customers has been assembled to judge the contest submissions. The judges are:

David A. Bader, Phd., Professor at the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Executive Director for High Performance Computing

"Critical problems today, including eScience, Social Media and Open Government Systems, are becoming more and more dependent on interacting with and understanding the relationships in the emerging Web of Data -- which is basically a graph made by linking the data together. The maturing standards of RDF and SPARQL provide an effective way of handling these emerging data graphs, especially if they can be processed at Web Scales. I'm excited that YarcData is investing in the RDF/SPARQL community to promote these important standards," said Jim Hendler, Professor of Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"We believe RDF/SPARQL will be to graph analytics what SQL is to relational databases. It's great to see the interest the contest has generated and we are excited about our 'who's who' panel of judges -- industry experts and YarcData customers, who are leading the charge on real life deployments of big data graph analytics," said Arvind Parthasarathi, President of YarcData.

The top six submissions will be selected on Sept.15, 2012, and the finalists will be offered time on YarcData's uRiKA graph analytics appliance to run their queries. Winning submissions will be selected based on a set of criteria that includes the business and/or human impact, complexity, scalability and performance, and innovation. Winners will be announced in a live web event on Dec. 6, 2012.

The contest will be open only to those individuals who are eligible to participate under U.S. and other applicable laws and regulations and whose submissions are in compliance with the contest rules. For more information, please visit http://yarcdata.com/graph-analytic-challenge.html.

About the uRiKA Graph Analytics ApplianceYarcData's uRiKA system is a Big Data appliance for graph analytics. uRiKA helps enterprises reveal unknown, unexpected or hidden relationships in Big Data by creating a highly-scalable, real-time graph analytics warehouse that supports ad hoc queries, pattern-based searches, inferencing and deduction. The uRiKA system is a purpose-built appliance for graph analytics featuring graph-optimized hardware that provides up to 512 terabytes of global shared memory, massively-multithreaded graph processors supporting 128 threads/processor, and highly scalable I/O with data ingest rates of up to 350 terabytes per hour -- and an RDF/SPARQL database optimized for the underlying hardware enabling applications to interact with the appliance using industry standard interfaces. uRiKA complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing analytics workflow. Subscription pricing for on-premise deployment of the appliance eases the adoption of the uRiKA system into existing IT environments.

About YarcData Inc. YarcData delivers business-focused real-time graph analytics for enterprises to gain business insight by discovering unknown relationships in Big Data. Early adopters include the Canadian government, Institute of Systems Biology, Mayo Clinic, Noblis, Sandia National Labs, and the United States government. Started as a division of Cray Inc., the YarcData business is in the process of transitioning to a subsidiary, YarcData Inc., a Cray company. YarcData is based in the San Francisco bay area and more information is at www.yarcdata.com.

About Cray Inc.As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology is designed to enable scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and YarcData and uRiKA are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.